Medical Moneyball: Informatics takes pulse of medicine

Medical informatics involves everything from developing ways to improve medication safety and electronic patient records to "Medical Moneyball," the analysis of patients' medical and genetic data by clinicians and researchers to search for patterns and create computer models to help make treatments more effective. Dr. Jonathan Bickel, Boston Children's Hospital's director of clinical research informatics, is Children's "Medical Moneyball" research chief. Like statistics geek Peter Brand (played by Jonah Hill in the film "Moneyball"), Bickel is the analytics apostle who acts as the liaison between doctors and researchers and a team of eight software engineers. Bickel's work is helping researchers analyze patient data for nuggets of information to create what are called predictive models to better deliver healthcare.